It’s not like there isn’t enough to see in town this week. There’s the TIFF Next Wave festival, The Avengers and Dark Shadows slugging it out for megaplex primacy, and plenty of smaller pictures trying to draw some attention on the sidelines. You know, your typical late-spring schedule.
And yet, people insist on providing us with additional options. (Seriously, this city is generous to a fault.) Saturday night, for example, the Toronto Student Film Festival takes over the Toronto Underground Cinema for its 2012 edition, screening this year’s winning submissions, as selected by director Ron Mann, actor Martha Burns and head of TIFF Bell Lightbox programming Jesse Wente. The show starts at 7 pm tickets are available here.
Need something to do on Sunday? Innis Town Hall is hosting DIY Art & Life: A Day With Joe Swanberg, bringing the prolific mumblecore auteur to town to screen Art History, The Zone and Silver Bullets, which comprise his Full Moon trilogy. The screenings are at 4 pm, 6 pm and 8 pm, respectively, with short Q&A sessions after the first two films and a master class moderated by Cinema Scope’s Jason Anderson after Silver Bullets. Tickets are available here.
Swanberg’s one of the most divisive filmmakers to come up through the mumblecore movement his raw, loosely structured and graphically sexual work provided an instant contrast to more thoughtful and serene productions like Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation or Aaron Katz’s Dance Party U.S.A. and Quiet City. But there’s power in Swanberg’s immediacy Nights And Weekends, his collaboration with Greta Gerwig, is a devastating, emotionally vibrant look at a couple coming apart. I’m always curious to see what he does next.
Finally, if you’re kicking around downtown on Monday night, Adam Nayman’s ongoing Stanley Kubrick lecture series at the Miles Nadal JCC seems poised to hit its high point with a class devoted to 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the greatest films ever made – and possibly not even Kubrick’s masterwork. (That, as they say, is a conversation for another time.) Class starts at 7 pm tickets are $12, available at the door students can drop in for just $6.
And yes, I know it’s up against the season finale of How I Met Your Mother is on, but that’s why you have a PVR, right?
